The present application relates to management of application versions.
There is a continually increasing number of terminals in use today, such as mobile telephones, PDAs with wireless communication capabilities, personal computers, self service kiosks and two-way pagers. Software applications which run on these terminals increase their utility. For example, a mobile phone may include an application which retrieves the weather for a range of cities, or a PDA may include an application that allows a user to shop for groceries. These software applications take advantage of the connectivity to a network in order to provide timely and useful services to users. However, due to the restricted resources of some terminals, and the complexity of delivering large amounts of data to the devices, developing and maintaining software applications remains a difficult and time-consuming task.
Markup languages, such as Extended Markup Language (XML), are becoming standard for presenting, formatting and exchanging generic data on networked terminals. For example, XML can be implemented by virtually all platforms and environments and can allow for seamless integration of heterogeneous systems using common data interfaces. XML processing is supported by core programming languages, XML-based languages (e.g. XPATH, XQUERY) and script language extensions (e.g. ECMAScript for XML-E4X).
Current applications, in particular for resource constrained terminals, can require excessive storage space and undesirable download times/bandwidth. For example, users of the terminal may only require access to an updated version of an application, but updates of current applications must typically be downloaded in their entirety. Further, multiple versions of the same application typically cannot be stored on the device, as resources can be limited.
Systems and methods are provided for dynamic management of applications to obviate or mitigate the aforementioned disadvantages.